Electrical connectors are mass produced by positioning an insulative housing, generally a plastic rectangularly shaped member, automatically at various locations along an assembly line for pin insertion and other machine accomplished steps until the electrical connector is in its final manufactured form. Heretofore, once the electrical connector is completed, the connectors are automatically conveyed to a completed connector hopper positioned to receive the connectors from a conveyor so that the completed connectors fall one by one into the hopper where they fall upon each other. This causes damage to the extending pins or conductors such as by causing some of the plated-on highly conductive metal to be scraped away from the conductors or pins or by bending the pins.
The connectors are manually removed from the hopper, one by one, inspected and manually packaged. Packaging the connectors can be done in bulk by filling a plastic bag or other suitable container with a number of connectors in contact with each other in a random manner, but bulk packaging generally is unsuitable because many of the connectors are damaged during transport. Another more time consuming and expensive method of packaging connectors has been by manually aligning the connectors in layers in a suitable container, such as a cardboard box, to minimize connector contact during storage. A layer of compressible material sometimes is disposed between each layer of handpacked connectors to minimize damage to the connectors during transport.
An improved type of packaging system which has experienced increasing significance involves the use of carrier strips on which electrical connectors or electronic components are mounted and carried. The strips are used, for example, for mounting or receiving a large number of electrical connectors, with the strips and retained connectors being wound on a reel or packaged in a container suitable for use in storage, transportation and retrieval of the packaged connectors. For example, the carrier strips are used to transport the electrical connectors or electronic components from a component manufacturer to a customer's assembly station where automatic equipment functions to remove the connectors from the carrier strip and mount the connectors to a printed circuit board or the like. The carrier strip also may function to bring different electrical connectors to an assembly station in proper order for sequential assembly.
Examples of such carrier strips and/or packaging systems are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,823,945 to Adelman, dated Apr. 25, 1989; 4,929,486 to Itou et al, dated May 29, 1990; 4,966,282 to Kawaniski et al, dated Oct. 20, 1990; 4,994,300 to Itou et al, dated Feb. 19, 1991; 5,005,275 to Borst et al, dated Apr. 9, 1991; 5,025,923 to Okui, dated Jun. 25, 1991; and 4,617,733 to Olson, dated Oct. 21, 1986 and assigned to the assignee of this invention.
One of the problems with carrier strip packaging systems of the character described is that certain electrical connectors or electronic components are manufactured in a wide variety of sizes, particularly different lengths. For instance, a type of electrical connector, commonly termed a header connector, includes a dielectric housing of a given length, with terminal pins projecting transversely of the housing for insertion into appropriate holes in a printed circuit board. The length of the header connector is determined by the number of circuits/terminal pins for which the connector was designed. Often, the terminal pins run the length of the dielectric housing in a plurality of rows. A given connector may have a "circuit size" ranging from two to fifteen or more circuits. Consequently, the lengths of the connectors according will be considerably different. Heretofore, such electrical connectors were mounted on the carrier strip with the lengths or axes of the connectors transverse to the length of the carrier strip. This results in the requirement of an inventory of carrier strips of different widths which, in turn, requires different sizes of reels or different sizes of boxes or containers. Transporting equipment also has to be capable of adjustment for the different sizes of packaging components. The end result is that carrier strip packaging systems are more expensive than one might consider.
This invention is directed to solving the above problems and providing a carrier strip type packaging system wherein the carrier strips, containers or boxes, and the like can be of constant dimensions regardless of the size or length parameters of the carried electrical connectors.